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The Female Hero

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In the past, studies concerning the hero, such as James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Joseph
Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, or Jessie
L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance, to name just a few, have been dedicated to the study of male protagonists. In Campbell's study, for example, he describes the woman as part of mother nature or as symbolic of mother nature itself, as cosmic goddess or evil goddess, but never as a central figure. As a result, the woman in such studies has been relegated to a secondary role, becoming a facilitator of the journey and its recompense, not its main subject. In The Female Hero in
American and British Literature, Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope contend that "our …show more content…
The journey of the upper class white male, a socially, politically and economically powerful subgroup of the human race, is identified as the generic type for the normal human condition; and other members of society -- racial minorities, the poor, and women -- are seen as secondary characters important only as aids or rewards in his journey" (4). I propose that this is no longer the case in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende,
Julia Álvarez, Clarice Lispector, Cristina Peri Rossi, Assia Djebar, and many others, the journey of the woman as hero/ine has taken center stage. Thus, the study of the "heroine" becomes necessary, if not inevitable. The fact that Assia Djebar dedicates her entire literary work to the reinstitution of the female voice in Algeria and that her narrators are always women, make my proposal of the investigation of the heroine in literature relevant. In addition, the motif of the journey, which, as we mentioned earlier, is related typically to the quest of the hero, seems to be always present in her narrative, specifically in the novel in question. In the beginning of So Vast the …show more content…
The silence of writing, the desert wind turning its inexorable millstone, while my hand races and the father's language (the language now, moreover, transformed into a father tongue) slowly but surely undoes the wrapping cloths from a dead love; and so many voices spatter into a lingering vertiginous mourning, way behind me the faint murmur of ancestors, the ululations of lament from veiled shadows floating along the horizon -- while my hand races on" (So Vast the
Prison 11-12). According to Juan Eduardo Cirlot, heroes are always travelers, owing to their constant unconformity and desire to bring about change (Dictionary 25). If we consider that a journey is more than a displacement through a physical space and that it also constitutes a desire or quest for change; or, as in this case, a journey to the past or a journey through the landscape of language
-- as the earlier passage reveals -- then Djebar's So Vast the Prison may belong categorically to the genre of the quest novel (on this, see also Kelly).
Djebar's novel may be understood as a quest for the

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